Mixed Race Studies

Is it still Interracial dating when you’re mixed?

Fusion
2015-02-19

Simone Jacobson
Washington, D.C.

No matter where I live or whom I date, I will always be out of context.

Here’s how it all began: My mother and my maternal grandparents were born in Burma. My grandpa’s father was Chinese and my grandma’s father was British; both of their mothers were Burmese. Unlike many first generation Asian Americans, my mom’s first language was English. My paternal grandparents are first and second generation Americans of Eastern European ancestry with firmly established Jewish identities.

Because I was raised in the racially intolerant Southwest, the fact that I developed my own strong Asian American identity is somewhat of a miracle. After all, Phoenix, Arizona is home to the nation’s strictest anti-immigration policies and state university fraternities that host “dress like black people”- themed MLK celebrations. And unlike “majority-black” Washington, D.C., my current home of 14 years, nearly 70 percent of the Phoenician population self-identified as white as of the 2010 Census.

Fortunately for me, I was immersed in a loving community of Asian Americans as early as kindergarten. Outside of my immediate family, the most influential people in my young life were my Thai American best friend (26 years together now, and counting) and my Korean American dance teacher, a strong, handsome man who never raised his voice, showered me with love as if I were his own daughter, and taught me I should always reach across to open the car door for a man whenever he opens mine.

Fast forward to the recent present: I turned 30 last year and was single and freshly broken-hearted for the first time in ten years after investing half a decade in a relationship that did not end up in what I had hoped would be a lifelong commitment. After a decade of back-to-back monogamous relationships throughout my 20s—first with a white Frenchman (three years), then with a black Jamaican Belizean American (five years)—I went on an online dating binge to get over a bad breakup with the latter.

After many continuous, failed attempts at love in the digital space, I was left disappointed and slightly lonelier than when I began. But my yearlong experience of dating strangers (of all races) revealed something more unsettling than the process itself: I’ve never culturally aligned with anyone I’ve dated.

During the online dating binge, I met an exceptionally diverse cast of characters vying for my attention. But one gentleman in particular, a sartorial East Asian dandy, shattered my post-breakup confidence when he said abruptly one day: “I’m a romantic guy, despite what you think. I just don’t see myself falling in love with you.”…

Read the entire article here.

Giuliani: Obama Had a White Mother, So I’m Not a Racist

The New York Times
2015-02-19

Maggie Haberman, Political Reporter

Nicholas Confessore, Political Reporter

Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York on Thursday defended his assertion that President Obama did not love America, and said that his criticism of Mr. Obama’s upbringing should not be considered racist because the president was raised by “a white mother.”

Mr. Giuliani’s remarks — made at a New York fund-raising event for Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin on Wednesday night and first reported by Politico — set off an uproar.

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Mr. Giuliani said at the event. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”

Critics suggested that Mr. Giuliani’s description of Mr. Obama’s upbringing reflected a prejudiced view that Mr. Obama was different from other Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Memories of Metis Women of Saint-Eustache, Manitoba — (1910-1980)

Oral History Forum/Forum d’histoire orale
Volumes 19-20 (1999-2000)
pages 90-111

Nicole St-Onge, Professor of History
University of Ottawa

Introductory Comments

In an article entitled “Hired Men: Ontario Agricultural Wage Labour in Historical Perspective” Joy Parr wrote the following, telling,  words:

Scholars too have claimed that from the beginnings of the province, agriculturalists’ desire for independence combined with the rigorous seasonality of rural work to determine that “no hierarchical labour organization would persist ilz Canadian agriculture.” Yet in each successive generation from the settlement phase onward, rural wage labourers have been essential to the functioning of the province’s persistent and unmistakably hierarchical agricultural system. Through two centuries of clearing, tilling, seeding, and harvesting, the relationships between land and labour and capital and labour have changed, but the reality of the rural hierarchy has been as enduring as the season.

The ‘rural hierarchy’ examined by Parr for Ontario also existed and endured in the Prairie region of Canada. Census data available since 1891 reveal that hired men, over the age of fourteen, were always an important component of farm labour on the Prairie; they represented 13% (6,000) of all rural workers in 1891, 19.4% (84,000) in 1931 and 14.1% (46,000) in 1951. Yet, standard histories of North American agriculture have had difficulty probing beyond the positivist myth that surround the ‘Family Farm’. Few studies discuss in any detail the existence of an impoverished underclass of rural wage workers. Even oral history projects dealing with rural inhabitants have tended to be celebratory; charting the progress of a community since its pioneering days without much regard or analysis to the price paid by some individuals for this ‘success.’ Or, other rural oral history have been apocalyptic lamenting the demise of the Family Farm again without much regard for the consequences ofthis economic and social restructuration for people other than the owners of farms or the businesses that service them…

Read the entire article here.

Association of Mixed Students hosts celebratory ‘Loving Week’

Student Life: the independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis since 1878
Volume 136, Number 38 (Thursday, 2015-02-12)
Page 3

Noa Yadidi, Staff Reporter

Featuring speed dating, free cupcakes and a co-programmed dance, this year’s Loving Week, hosted by the Association of Mixed Students, kicked off Monday in commemoration of the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia.

The group organized a week’s worth of activities to celebrate the case, which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Mixed decided to hold the event in proximity to Valentine’s Day because it fit in well with the themes of love and acceptance.

In continuing the weeklong celebration, students can participate in a speed-dating event at Ursa’s Stageside Thursday night and a dance on Friday night.

Students in Mixed feel that it is especially important to celebrate the individuality and uniqueness of mixed-race students at Washington University…

Read the entire article here.

One Playwright’s ‘Obligation’ To Confront Race And Identity In The U.S.

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2015-02-16

Jeff Lunden

Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins may be only 30 years old, but he’s already compiled an impressive resume. His theatrical works, which look at race and identity in America, have been performed in New York and around the country. Last year, Jacobs-Jenkins won the best new American play Obie Award for two of his works, Appropriate and An Octoroon.

An Octoroon is currently playing at Theater for a New Audience in New York…

…Over the past five years, the young playwright has written a trilogy of highly provocative and fantastical explorations of race in America. In Neighbors, a family of minstrels in blackface moves in next to a contemporary mixed-race family. In Appropriate, a white family discovers their dead father belonged to the KKK. His latest, An Octoroon, is a loose adaptation of a play written more than 150 years ago that deals with identity and race.

“They are all kind of like me dealing with something very specific, which has to do with the history of theater and blackness in America and form,” he says. “And also, my obligation, as a human being with regards to any of these themes.”

It is Jacob-Jenkins’ self-examination that drove Ben Brantley, the chief drama critic for The New York Times, to rank An Octoroon on the top of his best pays list last year. He saw it at Soho Rep, a tiny off-Broadway theater.

“[Jacobs-Jenkins] starts off from self-consciousness, which you would think would be a crippling place for a playwright to begin,” Brantley says.”But his self-consciousness isn’t just particular; it’s national, it’s universal. And it’s the self-consciousness of realizing that we don’t have the vocabulary, the tools to discuss race.”

The play, based on a 1859 melodrama by the Irish-Anglo playwright Dion Boucicault, tells the story of a young man who’s about to inherit a plantation and falls in love with a woman who is an octoroon — seven-eighths white, one-eighth black.

Director Sarah Benson points out that, in the original, all the parts had to be played by white actors…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the story here. Download the audio here. Read the transcript here.

Laura Kina: Blue Hawai’i

Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery
New Jersey City University
Hepburn Hall, Room 323
2039 Kennedy Boulevard
Jersey City, New Jersey

2015-01-27 through 2015-03-03
Artist Reception: 2015-01-29, 16:30-19:30 EST (Local Time)
Artist Talk: 2015-03-02, 17:30-18:30 EST (Local Time)

Laura Kina, Canefield Workers, 2013, oil on canvas, 30 x 45 inches.

“You won’t find Elvis or surfboards or funny umbrella-topped cocktails in my dystopic Blue Hawai’i.” The Chicago-based artist Laura Kina speaks of her latest series of paintings which are featured in this exhibition. Drawn from her family albums, oral history and community archives, Kina’s ghostly oil paintings employ distilled memories to investigate themes of distance, longing, and belonging. The setting of these paintings is her father’s Okinawan sugarcane field plantation community, Piʻihonua, on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi near Hilo. The predominant blue color of the series was inspired by the indigo-dyed kasuri kimonos repurposed by the Issei (first generation) “picture bride” immigrants for canefield work clothes. Blue Hawaiʻi echoes the spirits of Kina’s ancestors and shared histories of labor migration.

In 2009, Kina accompanied her father back to his hometown community in Hawaiʻi to interview him along with other Nisei (second generation) and Sansei (third generation) about their memories of plantation life. In 2012, she traveled to Okinawa with her father, collecting stories of heritage and history. She learned of her grandmother and great aunts having been Kibei Nisei, i.e., sent to Japan for their education and that in the devastation of WWII and the Battle of Okinawa, four family members were killed–two by forced suicide.

As U.S. relatives ceased to use the Okinawan dialect of Uchinaguchi or standard Japanese, stories like these were lost. In Blue Hawaiʻi, Kina seeks to reclaim these histories via reanimated traces from old photographs and present-day vestiges visible in paintings such as “Okinawa—All American Food” and “Black Market,” which capture the remnants of war and a continued American military presence in contemporary Okinawa. Risking distortion, misreading, nostalgia and erasure, the artist fully engages in, what she calls, “the messy business” of memory, collapsing time and space into one Blue Hawaiʻi.

Laura Kina is Vincent de Paul professor of Art, Media, & Design at DePaul University. She is the coeditor, along with Wei Ming Dariotis, of War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013); cofounder of the DePaul biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies conference; and cofounder and consulting editor of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies and reviews editor for the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.

Her solo exhibitions include Blue Hawaii (2014), Sugar (2010), A Many-Splendored Thing (2010), Aloha Dreams (2007), Loving (2006), and Hapa Soap Operas (2003). She has exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, India Habitat Centre, Nehuru Art Centre, Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum, the Rose Art Museum, the Spertus Museum, the University of Memphis, and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience.

For more about the exhibition, view an on-line catalog here.

Dorothy Roberts: Fatal Invention: The New Biopolitics of Race

University of California, Los Angeles
School of Law
385 Charles E. Young Drive East
1242 Law Building
Los Angeles, California 90095
2015-02-19, 17:00-18:30 PST (Local Time)
Room: TBD

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

We are witnessing the emergence of a new biopolitics in the United States that relies on re-inventing race in biological terms using cutting-edge genomic science and biotechnologies. Some scientists are defining race as a biological category written in our genes, while the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries convert the new racial science into race-based products, such as race-specific medicines and ancestry tests, that incorporate false assumptions of racial difference at the genetic level. The genetic understanding of race calls for technological responses to racial disparities while masking the continuing impact of racism in a supposedly post-racial society. Instead, I call for affirming our common humanity by working to end social inequities supported by the political system of race.

For more information, click here.

Mixed 101: Creating a Space to Explore Mixed Race Identity

Duke University
Durham, North Carolina 27708
Counseling & Psych Services (CAPS)
Resource Room 0010
Bryan Center – Multicultural Center
Thursdays, 17:00-18:30 EST (Local Time) on February 12, 19, 26, and March 5

Marcella Wagner and Cat Goyeneche

CAPS is offering a weekly group for students who identify as mixed or multiracial to dialogue and explore our experiences of being mixed race.

For more information, click here.

One Drop of Love

Northern Arizona University
Ashurst Hall
Flagstaff, Arizona
Wednesday, 2015-02-18, 18:00 MST (Local Time)

Performed by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. Presented by NAU College of Education

One Drop of Love, is an hour-long one woman show. This funny, interactive and moving memoir explores history, family, race, class, justice and love and takes audiences from the 1600s to the present, to cities all over the U.S. and to West and East Africa, where both father and daughter spent time in search of their ‘racial’ roots.

For more information, click here.

Are Mixed Race Asian/Whites, “Basically White”?

Multiracial Asian Families: thinking about race, families, children, and the intersection of mixed ID/Asian
2015-02-17

Sharon H. Chang

[She] never told the son who was crippled by polio about her relationship with his father. All she said was that the man was an American, a sergeant in the Army. He was one of the thousands of GIs who left children behind as victims of the conflict that the United States never officially called a war.
— “Life and Times of Le Van Minh” by Irene Virag

I’ve gotten some pretty vitriolic comments these last months regarding my writings on white-mixing not being synonymous with whiteness. A recent response to my piece protesting Asian Fortune’s troubled 2013 “Hapa” article:

“Guys…Sometimes you just need to calm the f down. You need to get out of your heads a little bit and stop over analyzing things. I’m sure all you hapas out there have some understanding of the way hapas are treated in Asia. Talk about superficial stereotypical understandings! Your ultra-liberal, ultra-progressive, straight-out-of-an-undergraduate-African-American-studies-class mumbo jumbo would only ever be considered in White countries. And you know damn well that you benefit from ‘White privilege.’ The reason I put that in quotes is beyond the scope of this comment. Don’t write back with some bullshit about traffic stops – I know the statistics.” (October 26, 2014)

Another recent response, this time to my piece on talking mixed race identity with young children for Hyphen Magazine:

“‘mom am i white?’

the answer is yes, he is. Stop confusing the poor child and STOP telling him he’s of Asian descent when you and the baby daddy are clearly white. He will grow up with an identity problem and will very likely hate you for it. Have some decency as a parent.” (February 10, 2015)…

…There are a lot of problems with the idea that Asian/whites are white: (1) it disallows space for contemporary Asian/whites to discuss the racialized experiences they do have when they are viewed and treated as non-white, (2) it ignores/invalidates/erases these oppressions as stemming from a long history of racism Asian/whites have faced nationally and globally that is an integral part of the larger narrative of race, and (3) it ultimately deflects from the more important point that it is not Asian/whites who created and uphold the racism we struggle to undo today…

Read the entire article here.